JODI.ORG

Their background is in photography and video art; in the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their “Screen Grab” period, making video works by recording the computer monitor’s output while working, playing video games, or coding.

In “Max Payne Cheats Only” JODI presents a series of video game “cheats”: alterations to the behavior of a video game that are often built in by the original programmers to help players who have reached an impasse. Here the artists have compiled cheats from the ultra-violent New York vigilante game Max Payne. The artists write: “We wanted to do something that was non-aesthetically ours. We didn't want reduced abstracts from a game structure, but to play with “Cheats Only” in Godmode - discovering a newbie readymade within the aesthetic of a blockbuster game just played differently (and now we also added as a bonus the Real Live Version, Max Payne as seen on Google - Cheaters Gallery).” JODI have intervened in the program structure in such a way that absurd perspectives and effects alter the game’s otherwise realistic graphics: we see the massive hero repeating idiotic movements; he dips his angular head into a virtual matrix; his body appears semitransparent. The re-processing can be read as a free interpretation of the bullet-time effect that distinguishes Max Payne from other games, and by which the slow motion enables a new perception of space and time.